R.A.

For my rhetorical analysis this week I actually looked at an opposing view to my argument about school uniforms. This study done by researchers at Notre Dame said that uniforms do not lead to an improvement in attendance, behavior, drug use, or academic achievement.

1. The argument is obviously the fact that uniforms don't improve student behavior and scores. In fact they say that wearing uniforms has a negative effect on these things.

2. The audience is a little bit harder to pinpoint. Only people really interested in this topic would even read this abstract report. Probably well-educated people who might have some sort of say in the uniforms issue would be their target audience.

3. They used a lot of logos, because they tried to go about it as scientifically as possible, looking at kids in a high school in Long Beach, California. They tried to use correlation coefficients to relate wearing uniforms to these variables. Pathos wasn't used a lot, because this abstract isn't so much of an argument as it is a straight presentation of facts, or at least what the researchers consider to be facts. I took one Statistics class and I already know that their study and on top of that, the way they interpreted their data is not very statistically significant or accurate. Ethos was used, because being from a major university such as Notre Dame is pretty credible. People think university researchers know it all. I don't think this argument was remotely sufficient. They leave a lot of things out and much is assumed throughout. The argument was kind of typical, but I felt they could have used other research techniques and been more effective. Although I also think that by using other research techniques they would have proven their opposition's point. Their data wasn't particularly accurate, because their sampling techniques leave much to be desired. The same goes for relevance. They're almost comparing apples to oranges here.'

4. I think their argument was not a very good one at all, which helps my case a lot. All they had going for them was scientific data, which wasn't even gathered very scientifically at all. Much was left out.